[…] As this is a secret document and we will not be given access to review the policy. It is not wise for us the parliamentarians present here to “ensure swift implementation” of something we have not seen and will not be granted access to. Birgitta Jónsdóttir, member of parliament Iceland: Nato Parliamentary Assembly in Romania (09.10.2011) (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)

Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that more and more resemble teaching, learning, and “human” service, in the older sense of dedicated loyalty. (…) The shock of recognition! In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained — ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium Is The Massage (1967) (View on gamamb.tumblr.com)

If industrial crises follow periods of overwork as inevitably as night follows day, bringing after them lockouts and poverty without end, they also lead to inevitable bankruptcy. So long as the manufacturer has credit he gives free rein to the rage for work. He borrows, and borrows again, to furnish raw material to his laborers, and goes on producing without considering that the market is becoming satiated and that if his goods don’t happen to be sold, his notes will still come due. At his wits’ end, he implores the banker; he throws himself at his feet, offering his blood,...

So what would stop a former slave from going up into the hills where there’s plenty of land and just living happily there? They [former slaveowners] hit on the same method that everyone hits on: try to capture them with consumer goods. So they offered first teasers—easy terms, gifts, and so on. And then when people got trapped into wanting consumer goods and started getting into debt at company stores and so on, pretty soon you had a restoration of something similar to slavery, from the plantation owners’ point of view, about the same. Hopes and Prospects from Madison to...